June 2006, Week 2 -- Sign on
the Digital Line

DocuSign is a Web service that lets you display any document that
needs to be signed, and the reader can sign it right there online.

Such signatures are legal under a federal
law commonly called the ESIGN Act, passed in June 2000. The main point
of the law is that an electronic signature is legal and valid if you,
the signer, say it is. This gets around the problem of scanning a
written signature and then storing that as an image in the computer.
Such an image would not necessarily count as a legal signature.

When you are first asked to sign a document
presented on a Web site, you spend a minute or two setting up an account
and selecting a type font for your signature. It could look like John
Hancock's on the Declaration of Independence, if you want. The main
point is you agree that this is now your legal signature online. From
then on, any time you want to sign something, you check it and a blue
box appears around the signature, indicating it has been validated by
DocuSign.

The cost of providing "in session" signing
to customers on your Web site is about $15 a month, with the price
depending on frequency of use. The service also provides records showing
who has signed any document so far, and which documents in an agreement
are still pending. If you don't want to set up in-session signing on a
Web site, you can send e-mails displaying the contracts needing
signatures, and recipients can still sign online. There's a free 30-day
trial of the service at
www.docusign.com.

Smart
Drawing

SmartDraw 7 Suite Edition is the latest incarnation of a program that
started as shareware way back in the mists of software time. It competes
with Microsoft's Visio for drawing floor plans, flow charts, engineering
diagrams, etc., but sells for less: $197 for Smart Draw 7 and $499 for
Visio Professional.

For those of us who would like a little help in drawing our flow charts,
circuit diagrams, landscape designs, floor plans, etc., SmartDraw 7 has
1,300 templates, and 63,000 symbols that can be plugged into those
templates. And as long as we're doing the numbers, the learning curve is
zero.

There are 17 business categories in the forms section, and each category
has a dozen templates. They include medical, marketing, shipping and
receiving, school forms, invoices and sales receipts, etc. There are
nine engineering categories. Science has just one category, but that has
40 templates, including star charts, genetics, mathematics, units of
measurement, etc. All of the templates can be pasted into PowerPoint,
Word and Excel.

Any names, comments and symbols can be linked to any others in a design
you're putting together. Doing a family tree or organizational chart is
practically automatic. Boxes with commentary can be expanded to show any
amount of text and images. Shape and link choices appear in a panel on
the left of each screen. Lots more info and a free trial can be had at
www.smartdraw.com.

A special note on pricing: Though SmartDraw
7 is cheaper than Visio at full retail, Microsoft products are nearly
all available at what's called "academic pricing." For instance, Visio
Professional is just $165 through discounters at bizrate.com if you can
show you're a student or teacher.

Sales
Tax

Sales taxes in the U.S. vary from state to
state, county to county and even town to town. Figuring out the sales
tax on goods sold nationwide is such a hassle that many companies won't
do it.

We found a Web site that figures it all out for
merchants. It's
www.avalara.com. If you go there and click on "Avatax Connect," you
can sign up for a service that integrates with QuickBooks and other
major accounting programs to automatically calculate sales tax by ZIP
code. Fees start at $10 a month plus a $50 setup fee.

Another Day, Another
Greeting Card

Joy averages a greeting card a day. If we
act on the assumption that she is not the only person in the world who
likes to make her own greeting cards, we can pass along two new programs
that are great for the craft: Greeting Card Factory Deluxe and Photo
Explosion Deluxe. (Photo Explosion is called Print Explosion in the Mac
version.)

Both programs are from Nova Development (www.novadevelopment.com),
and the art choices are really good. Photo Explosion has 5,000 photos on
disk (you can add your own, of course) and 3,000 projects you can do
with photos. Greeting Card Factory has 85,000 graphics and more than
20,000 greeting card and other projects. Each program is $50.

Books

"It's Never Done That Before" by John Ross;
$30 from No Starch Press (www.nostarch.com).
This is a great book for people who have some confidence in their
ability to manage the computer. At this point in the computer age,
that's lots of people.

The author points out that most problems
seem to occur right after installing a new program or piece of hardware.
Isn't that the truth. In fact, nearly every problem we've ever
encountered occurred after installing a new program.

We've mentioned the solutions several times
before, one of which is to use System Restore, part of the Systems Tools
list under Accessories in Windows XP. The author also suggests pressing
the F8 key when the computer is turned on but before it boots up. One of
the options that comes up is Last Known Good Configuration. Check that
one. As with System Restore, your data files and e-mail will not be
affected.